


just last the years

by little_giddy



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-21
Updated: 2011-06-21
Packaged: 2017-11-07 02:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/425886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_giddy/pseuds/little_giddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So this is a missing scenes fic for the scenario where Cobb is dreaming the whole film. <i>‘A favour’, Arthur writes without breaking her concentration by speaking, the first entry on the column marked ‘LIST.’ Eames holds his hand out for the pen and writes below it, ‘a big one.’</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	just last the years

*

Ariadne is the last to arrive.

This is appropriate, she thinks, as she was the last to receive a call and the furthest from the LA suburbs.

She’s the last in the door, and she wonders when she’s going to stop feeling like that. Arthur told her once that with extraction, you’re a veteran after one or two jobs; Ariadne is on five, strictly one level down info runs, and still feels like the newest kid in a country school, despite Mal’s extraction lessons and Cobb’s admiration for her building skills.

Arthur spots her slipping through the patio doors and eyeing the discarded paintbrushes.

‘James and Philippa?’ she asks before she can stop herself, their names feeling as odd and intrusive out loud as the one time she attempted to call Cobb ‘Dom’ like the others did very occasionally.

‘Grandmother,’ Arthur answers, sitting at the table like he’s been there before (and he probably has). ‘Miles is flying in from Paris.’

Ariadne looks around the heavy-wood panelled kitchen and spots the spinning top on the table, notes that it’s in a small plastic bag marked ‘evidence’, and swallows. She feels the top of her thigh where she can feel the chess piece through her jeans, prodding her skin in a way that should be uncomfortable but just reminds her that no-one else has touched her totem and invaded her trust in reality today.

Arthur sees what she’s looking at. ‘Eames took it from the crime scene. He’s out on recon at the hospital. We still don’t know what actually happened.’ His eyes fill with something angry and flicker back to hers. ‘What really happened.’

Putting a hand on the table to steady herself, even though she’s sitting down, Ariadne looks up and meets his eyes. She can hear everything he isn’t asking, because she’s _new_ , still, not one of the team in its varying constellations the way the others are, and he’s offering her an out, right now.

‘How do we get Cobb back?’

Arthur doesn’t visibly sag. Ariadne would be shocked if he knew how to do that. But he takes a breath and tells her who thinks what and who knows what.

Ariadne processes it, giving up the pretence of being fine and passing her chess piece between her hands while Arthur tells her about the anniversary tradition, the trashed hotel room, the bodies. The _body_ , that is, as Cobb might have seemed all but dead, but he’d had a pulse. Now he had a bed on a coma ward and the doctors had no idea how far beyond the Glasgow scale their patient had gone.

Eames and Arthur had been called in by Miles as soon as he’d been notified, desperate to find out what had actually happened to his daughter and his son in law. They’d scoped the scene for evidence, found a PASIV, had heard the medics use words like ‘drug overdose’ and ‘blood labs.’

‘All they’ll find is a light sedative,’ Arthur finished and took the coffee Ariadne gave him with a nod. She needed something else to do with her hands and it might as well be warm. ‘They have no idea.’

‘You think they went under again.’ It isn’t a question. It also isn’t polite, considering the lengths Arthur has gone to not to mention Mal and Cobb’s last trip to limbo, the one that had left Mal increasingly unspecific in her actions and Cobb with circles under his eyes.

‘I think they went under,’ Arthur folds his hands together, moving to the seat at angle to Ariadne’s. ‘I think she came back - but didn’t believe it. I think Mal killed herself because she thought this was still limbo. I think Cobb’s still down there with no way back.’

‘It’ll have been -’

Ariadne knows the ratios and calculations required.

‘It’ll have been decades.’

*

Ariadne wants to cry when Arthur and Eames drop her off at her apartment building in LA, slipping out of the backseat with a nod and a quick press of her fingertips against the driver seat window.

She wants to cry because she thinks Mal might have been her friend, if she’d wanted, if they’d had a little more time. And because Cobb is the one who laughed and patted her on the shoulder when she narrowed her eyes and made a city fold in half like making a pizza a calzone the first time, while Arthur and Mal had raised their eyebrows before suggesting they leave before the projections take notice of the sky’s new population.

The tears don’t come. Not even when she thinks of Mal’s tentative invite to dinner and movies with the kids, or the way Arthur had folded his hands to stop unconsciously drawing grid patterns in their table mats while they waited on Eames.

Ariadne sketches impossible buildings and penrose stairs on top of penrose stairs until the sun comes up.

She knows how to bring Cobb back.

*

Ariadne is first to the LA base - another abandoned office space for let, thank you, recession - the next morning.

The other two will arrive soon enough, but until then, she has paper, one huge white sheet of it from an industrial printer swaddling two pillars and forming a wall between them. She tapes it until it’s stiff and stretched tightly enough to draw on.

She draws a solitary line in a red marker that shakes in her hand until she pulls the cap off at eye level for the first three feet before ending it with a curly bracket. With a breath, she switches to blue and draws spirals downwards on the taut white page, switching to green, to purple, to a grey so pale she borders it with black. Below the black line she draws patterns and houses and stretches of beach and sandcastles.

A coffee appears by the pillar and she barely notices except to drink it in two long swallows, beginning to fill in the numbers (5 = 60, 365 x 60...), mirroring the drawing on the other side but marking in initials. Marking in names. Drawing lines that split into forks and come back to meet each other like paths in a maze. A second coffee (sweeter, caramel macchiato) and another hand with a pen appears when she draws hard vertical lines and writes ‘list’ at the top of the first one.

‘A favour’, Arthur writes without breaking her concentration by speaking, the first entry on the column marked ‘LIST.’ Eames holds his hand out for the pen and writes below it, ‘a big one.’

*

Ariadne is standing in the room outside the hostess stand of one of the most expensive restaurants in LA with Arthur and Eames in suits that look tailored. Considering Ariadne’s relatively modest fortune after five short jobs, she thinks it likely they _were_ tailored and not cheaply, either.

‘What if he’s heard and isn’t here?’ Eames asks, casting a glance at the glass panel of the door.

‘He’ll be here,’ Ariadne and Arthur answer together.

The hostess opens the door. ‘Mr Saito asks if you would join him in the private room at the rear.’

Saito owes them. Saito owes them the current existence of his company despite the Fischer empire and he owes Cobb in the dubious currency of honour for something they’ve never spoken about in company.

‘Mr Cobb and I usually favour a table by the window,’ Saito says from the head of the table as they walk in. ‘Such a shame to be at such a splendid height and have walls. However, our discussion requires something more private.’

‘You’ve heard,’ Arthur states. He slides Ariadne’s chair out in passing - not in the self-conscious way some of her dates in the past have, as if expecting her to thank them, just pulls it out and sits in the one next to it as Eames sits down opposite. Ariadne wonders how long he’s been doing that, for her only just to be noticing.

‘I have,’ Saito confirms. ‘I hope you plan to do something about it.’

‘We need your help,’ Ariadne leans forward, elbows on the table. ‘We can get him back.’

Saito looks at them, and Ariadne knows no amount of make up or soft lighting will hide how little sleep they’ve had lately. ‘Your plan will not be a sensible one. I can tell that even now.’

Eames laughs, a sound so alien since Ariadne took Arthur’s call three days ago that she jumps. Arthur puts a hand on her elbow - to steady himself or her, she’ll never know - and looks at Eames. ‘You have no idea. Even by our standards.’

Saito gives them a considering glance before pulling the cord behind him. ‘We may as well eat while you explain. And will I be calling our good friend Fischer?’

*

Ariadne lifts a pen to begin on the next wall but stops, putting it down in favour of a black. She draws boxes, rows of them, a foot wide and tall.

And then she waits.

Eames arrives before Arthur and she’s glad of it. She’s reaching the edge of her skill set - what she understands of the next phase is still too nascent and instinctual.

With a nod, Eames picks up the back marker and starts to write. He writes motivations, decision points, simpler motivations and draws arrows between the boxes in different colours. He maps the people - the subject - the way Ariadne mapped the streets.

Ariadne works a row below and a few squares behind, drawing scenes from the levels she’s mapped out and matching them to his squares until they have the maze of decisions Cobb will have to navigate.

‘You shouldn’t be afraid to ask him to help,’ Eames comments lightly, handing her the coffee in a dusty, chipped mug he’d dug out of the old staff kitchen and sitting beside her on the edge of the table close enough to briefly bump his shoulder against hers. ‘If there’s anything Arthur and I agree on, it’s that neglecting a source of information or scrimping on the details because of it is an idiotic move. And it’s not like either of you are talking to anyone else other than my wonderful self.’

 

*

Arthur and Eames come into the LA base, wearing suits they usually use to pretend to be lawyers of some variety.

Ariadne hasn’t pointed out the predictability they occasionally display on this level _(in reality_ , she reminds herself sharply), but someday she might. There’s something about the occasional routine that grounds them, despite ‘no routines’ being one of the rules of not getting caught.

She could have pulled on power dressing clothes and gone along, but her head would have been in the loft anyway, so she stayed in her jeans and t-shirt frayed at the hem and drew line after line and made them meet on half the walls.

‘All go okay?’ she asks. They nod, Eames pulling off his tie as Arthur doesn’t.

‘Saito bought the hospital outright, signed over today. We’re ready to go when-’ Eames pauses and looks around at the walls and then back to her with a raised eyebrow, ‘well, darling, when we’re ready to go.’

‘And when the chemist gets here,’ Arthur adds, eyeing her with something a little like concern.

Ariadne sees them glance between each other and decides that whatever they have to say, they can do it while she gets changed into street clothes.

But her curiosity is an evil thing and is the reason she’s there in the first place, so she looks through the crack of the door just a little.

‘She’s not an architect, Arthur, she’s - do you know, I don’t even know,’ Eames says, and Ariadne thinks he might be 90% serious for once. ‘Look at this. It’s not a level - it’s a world. It’s worlds. It’s a ground for _narratives.’_

Arthur has his head tilted and one fingertip tracing the edges of the photo album on the work table. Ariadne knows which one it is, she’s looked at them so much lately. It’s one from Mal and Cobb’s early years, with pictures of their old neighbourhood from just before Mal got pregnant. She knows so much more about them now.

She knows how much this means to Arthur, now, and how long he’s been a feature in those albums, too. How much he must be feeling their absence in the planning, even though they’re the reason for the job.

‘She’s pushing it all right,’ Arthur answers, and Ariadne allows her pride to be pricked that he’s the one concerned, not the one impressed.

Ariadne walks out, dressed in a neater and more layered version of the outfit she’d been wearing before. They look at her.

‘One more time,’ Arthur says, curling his hands around the edge of the worktable.

‘We go into the hospital with Saito, Fischer and Yusuf. We go into Cobb’s subconscious.’

‘We find him in limbo,’ Arthur nods.

‘We bring this-’ Ariadne waves a hand to the walls and the pillars with their stretched paper sheets filled with buildings, the whole loft covered in diagrams and sketches, ‘with us into his limbo. We build this scenario in limbo, overriding whatever we find there. I’ll be new to him again, which means he’ll feed himself the scenario by explaining it to me.’

Arthur looks away at that and Ariadne knows that’s the part they all hate, even though it’s a kindness, if you look at it sideways. Dom Cobb will never have the news of his wife’s death broken to him: he’ll have it embedded into his worldview along with the passage of time, like electrical wires running through walls in a building. All to bring him peace enough to leave limbo without her, because that’s the crux of it: he’ll never listen if they say she’s dead and he’ll never leave without her. So they have to plant one simple idea into his mind: the truth.

They talk though the plan and Ariadne can feel Arthur’s eyes on her at odd moments, feels him tugging her wrist lightly after he drops Eames at his apartment.

*

She’s been to Arthur’s apartment once. It was the night after her first job, and she was high on pure creation, on seeing the level she’d built populated and altered like a living, reactive skin that they happened to be walking on.

She’d also had the mother of all crushes on Arthur.

He’d been kind to her when she’d been lost in drawings and textures, teaching her the tricks like the penrose stairs and endless corridors behind mirrors. Sometimes, that and a jawline are enough when you’re lost in LA and dreams and wishing hard for Paris cobbles.

They’d gotten extremely drunk on whiskey shots that crept up on them throughout the debrief and done nothing but fall asleep on the sofa in a heap, Arthur retaining enough presence of mind to drag a blanket from some cupboard Ariadne hadn’t noticed on the way in.

The apartment was warmer than Ariadne had expected the first time and it surprised her again. Something about Arthur made people think of steel and black sofas and glass walls, but the reality was tidier and warmer, with bookshelves and cabinets housing antiques along the corridors and lights reflected in wine bottles accruing dust.

Ariadne sat down hard on the couch without being asked to take a seat, partly because she thought it a lesser indignity than falling on the floor. It wasn’t until she saw the dark wood and fluttering cotton curtains that she remembered - truly remembered - why they were doing the job at all. It wasn’t until there was a couch instead of a work table that she remembered what it was to be a human being in a single permeable skin instead of another stretched white page among so many looping panels of them in the loft. She’s carrying five levels in her head without the comfort of them having a true vertical relationship to each other.

Arthur didn’t say anything when he came into the living room to find her curled up into a ball on his couch, fast asleep, except to remember the blanket in the cupboard by the hall a second time.

*

‘How long?’ Ariadne called out a few minutes after waking up.

‘Just long enough for me to find some things to put in a pot and render edible,’ Arthur calls back as she pads her way to the kitchen doorway. She doesn’t remember taking her shoes off.

‘You miss them,’ she states, flat out, while he’s doing something with coriander and a sauce. ‘More than I do, especially when we’re at the loft everyday. And you’re the one finding blankets when I fall asleep on the couch.’

She sees the muscles on his back twitch, at once higher and closer together. ‘You’re going to need that kind of bluntness to keep Dom on a timetable in there.’

‘It’s limbo,’ Ariadne bites back, ‘you’ll be the one constructing the perceptions of time.’

Arthur turns, both elbows crooked and palms flat against the edge of the worktop behind him. ‘And you’re carrying everything else, including the transitions between what Cobb will think of as levels. I’ll be my precise self. You have to be everything. But you understand that.’ He turns back to the hobs and tests a strand of pasta.

Ariadne feels the breath go out of her. ‘I don’t know why I tried to make this an argument.’

Arthur’s head falls forward and when he looks up at her, it’s with lines crinkled into the edges of his eyes and something like a smile. ‘Because you’re carrying worlds in your head and nobody’s talking about how you’re in charge of this one, but you are.’

Ariadne nods and gestures that she’ll be on the couch. Just as she turns, Arthur says, ‘And thank you. Because I do. Miss them, I mean.’

She turns back. ‘Will you help? I mean, of course, but, will you help me?’

‘Just let me know what you need.’

Ariadne takes a breath. ‘Details. I need details. About them.’

*

And then they’re in.

*

Ariadne encounters Cobb’s projection of Mal for the first time and it’s also her first time holding the two parts of limbo separate, as if they were levels. There’s Arthur and the Paris warehouse. There’s Cobb and the composite Paris she builds to blow his mind with her instant talent. She’d be modest, but she did the same thing the first time, and it’s kind of amazing to be briefly off of the leash of _plausibility._

Until Mal’s knife sinks into her gut.

The shock of seeing her, but seeing that it _isn’t_ her, and seeing all that Cobb’s grief and rage has made her, is worse than the wound.

When Arthur is by her side in the Parisian warehouse, squeezing her wrist as familiarly as he dares, and Ariadne is done shouting at Cobb, she lets out a series of sharp breaths and meets Arthur’s eyes. Cobb is safely distracted in the bathroom - she can see the walls there shake minutely with the power of it. ‘He’s angry,’ Ariadne says in a low voice, ‘he’s really angry. Because she left him.’

*

Ariadne doesn’t mean to go exploring in Cobb’s created world, down the elevator, hooked into what he thinks is his own mind.

She’s under strict instructions to stretch her mind thinly as little as possible, in fact.

It’s a small victory of improvisation over wallcharts when her transgression speeds up the scenario by three decision points.

*

The list of things that had gone wrong in the rainy city was astounding. Cobb expecting his subconscious to be militarised wasn’t even the least of them, though it was the least surprising and the one they’d kick themselves for the most.

*

The hotel is creepy. The clothes are creepy. She wonders what the hell she was thinking and accidentally creates copies of James and Philippa to remind herself. The glasses shiver against each other when Cobb notices, projections turning towards them and slowing. _Slowing._

Ariadne eyes Arthur. His forehead shows the slightest sign of effort as he explains what would be happening if it were a level - _the projections are looking for the dreamer. In this case, me._

She looks around and realises that he’s holding the scenario too rigidly and he _must_ know it by now. He must. But she can’t ask.

_Quick. Give me a kiss._

Ariadne moves without thinking, choosing to file away the conversation about how a quick kiss (with her) is enough to break his concentration and kick them into a normal timeflow for another day. Bigger problems. Such as _they’re still looking at us._

 

*

When Ariadne sees Saito bleeding and Fischer shot outside the strongroom and knows what she has to do, her first thought comes unbidden: Arthur won’t know. He won’t know that she’s dropping off of their map, the one where he’s controlling Cobb’s perception of time as if it’s scaling down through levels, the one where she’s controlling and building everything else. He won’t know she’s following Cobb into the limbo they haven’t constructed, where anything could live, to get back the two people playing parts in this scenario because of favours owed and honour. When she shouted _Fischer is a real person_ into his ear, what she meant was _and he’s here to save you._ It’s completely irrational, but she thinks that somehow Arthur should know, because they kissed.

When she kicks Fischer into the storm and tells Cobb to bring back Saito, she’s not acting anymore. Ariadne doesn’t ask; she orders, because she’s getting more used to doing that, and because maybe the weight of the trust she’s giving Cobb will be enough to pull him back to them after exorcising his grief for Mal.

Waking him up will be hell, though, because Ariadne knows in her gut that he’s ahead of the rest on the grieving part, now. They’ve guided him through, but where does that leave them?

*

Arthur is slumped against the side of the elevator, curled into its corner the way she fell on his couch in another reality.

In the second before Ariadne is kicked through to the first rendezvous point, she feels panic, not knowing whether Arthur is still out or ahead.

*

The two of them on an island. Her brain feels like mush, feels like hell, feels like falling - feels like Cobb is going to be all right.

They won’t even have to sell this transition as a kick without Cobb there to see it.

Ariadne waits until she’s said it out loud - _I think he’ll be all right_ \- and uses the lurch in her stomach at the relief of it and the relief on Arthur’s face to kick them to the rendezvous point in the plane. This one doesn’t feel like the mammoth effort of will to reshape limbo around them: it feels like letting everything go.

*

Ariadne sees Arthur giving Cobb a relieved glance on the plane-level and gives him a slow smile of her own.

They pretend to part ways, Saito, Yusuf and Fischer giving them nods of acknowledgement in the airport of their self-made limbo as they head to the edges of what Ariadne built. They would be kicked out within the hour.

Ariadne, Arthur and Eames head to the house that Cobb’s mind built, where Miles, his last and final guide, leads him through to his children.

James and Philippa don’t sound so strange and unfamiliar anymore.

They watch as Cobb comes back into the dining room to find the spinning top still spinning, sitting down at the table and passing it from hand to hand as Ariadne had done not so long before with her chess piece.

Miles sits opposite and starts to explain.

*

After one last kick, they wake up in a hospital room in LA.

Ariadne reaches an arm out for contact, for reality, and finds Eames. He grips her hand hard.

Arthur is by the bed, helping Cobb sit up.

He’s lived two lifetimes of impossibilities, Ariadne realises, even though it feels as though this one has made old men and women of them all, except Mal.

‘Why did you tell me there?’ Cobb coughs out after a glass of water.

‘In case you needed time,’ Eames replies, sitting in the chair by the bed as the sun makes its way through the cotton curtains.

It’s two weeks after the phone call from Arthur to Ariadne that began with ‘something happened. It’s bad.’

*

Arthur drops Eames off first, Eames putting a hand against the glass as she moves into the passenger seat.

Ariadne orders them in food and keeps checking for some physical difference - some sunburn from the snow glare, some tenderness from the falling and being battered against a shoreline - but there is none. She doesn’t feel the same in her skin. She wonders if this was what he’d meant about feeling like a veteran. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

When they’re both sitting on the couch, doing nothing but listening to the radio and the traffic through the open window, Arthur catches her hand when she’s about to trace the bones on the back of her hand for a sixth time. He swings one leg up onto the couch to shut out the rest of the room and wraps himself around her. This time, the blanket’s already over the back of the couch and they reach for it at the same time.

They haven’t talked about anything, Ariadne realises dimly, but that feels all right when Arthur’s forehead is against her temple and he’s got an elbow leaning on her shoulder for her to lean her head on. Her lips find the inside of his arm and her leg hooks inside his to keep his leg from falling off the couch and make them a tangled mess of limbs.

*

They take Cobb home the next day, with the intention of visiting every day until he tells them to go away, and maybe even then. Saito and his lawyers are sorting things out in the way that they do: without divulging details.

Ariadne wants to apologise that some things are out of place - the photo albums and sketch books she used to create a limbo Cobb would accept as his own. The two pictures of the children she used to create their likeness to guide him to his own conclusions, though she couldn’t bear to create their faces.

Everything is back in its right place, but only approximately.

There is nothing to do but go on.

*

The first time they gather together again - even Yusuf, who Arthur quietly paid to do the job in the first place - is the funeral.

That’s one thing, Ariadne thinks. Reality gave Cobb the chance to have a funeral where theirs hadn’t.

Cobb takes the spinning top from his pocket and sets it to spinning on the lid of the coffin. Whatever the minister thinks of this, he keeps it to himself, and Miles lets out a choked sound and has to look away. The spinner topples into the grave to lie on the ground there, to be covered by the coffin.

She remembers the scene in the scenario where Arthur had to explain to the younger version of Ariadne that Mal was dead. They’d had to play all of that beginning straight, even when Cobb was supposedly elsewhere, because his subconscious was in the very air. She slips a hand into Arthur’s.

Mal, she thinks, was lovely.

END


End file.
